Why Do People Help?

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Why Do People Help?

• Prosocial Behavior

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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Prosocial behavior is any act performed with the
  goal of benefiting another person, regardless of
  motive.

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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Altruism is the desire to help another person
  even if it involves a cost to the helper.

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Defining Prosocial Behavior

• Prosocial Behavior

• Benevolence

• Pure Altruism

From Simpson, 2004
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Type of Behavior
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Definition
Example

• Prosocial Behavior

• Benevolence

• Pure Altruism

From Simpson, 2004
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Type of Behavior
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Definition
Example

• Any action intended to benefit another
  (regardless of motive)

• Giving a large tip to a waiter to impress your
  boss

• Prosocial Behavior

• Benevolence

• Pure Altruism

From Simpson, 2004
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Type of Behavior
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Definition
Example

• Prosocial Behavior

• Benefits another intentionally for no external
  reward

• Sending 20 to a charity to make yourself feel
  good

• Benevolence

• Pure Altruism

From Simpson, 2004
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Type of Behavior
Defining Prosocial Behavior
Definition
Example

• Prosocial Behavior

• Benefits another intentionally for no external or
  internal reward

• Jumping on a railroad track to help a stranger
  who has fallen

• Benevolence

• Pure Altruism

From Simpson, 2004
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• A basic question that people have asked is
  whether people are willing to help when there is
  nothing to gain, or if they only help when there
  is some benefit for them.

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Theories of Prosocial Behavior

• Evolutionary
• Social exchange
• Empathy-altruism

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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Evolutionary Psychology Instincts and Genes

Evolutionary Psychology is the attempt to
explain social behavior in terms of genetic
factors that evolved over time, according to the
principles of natural selection.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Evolutionary Psychology Instincts and Genes

Darwin recognized that altruistic behavior posed
a problem for his theory if an organism acts
altruistically, it may decrease its own
reproductive fitness.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Evolutionary Psychology Instincts and Genes

The idea of kin selection is the idea that
behaviors that help a genetic relative are
favored by natural selection. Suggests can pass
on genes by helping genetic relatives have
children or by helping their children survive.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Evolutionary Psychology Instincts and Genes

The norm of reciprocity is the expectation that
helping others will increase the likelihood that
they will help us in the future. Suggests
reciprocity may increase likelihood of survival.
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Evaluation of Evolutionary approach

• Although theorists can tell a story about
  evolutionary reasons for helping, we cannot know
  for sure whether helping has an evolutionary
  basis.
• Retrospective explanations, no hard evidence.

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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Social Exchange The Costs and Rewards of Helping

Social exchange theory argues that much of what
we do stems from the desire to maximize our
outcomes and minimize our costs. Like
evolutionary psychology, it is a theory based on
self-interest unlike it, it does not assume that
self-interest has a genetic basis.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Social Exchange The Costs and Rewards of Helping

• Helping can be rewarding because
• increases the probability that someone will help
  us in return
• relieves the personal distress of the bystander
• gains us social approval and increased
  self-worth.

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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Social Exchange The Costs and Rewards of Helping

Helping can also be costly (danger, time, money)
thus it decreases when costs are high.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Empathy and Altruism The Pure Motive for Helping

Batson (1991) is the strongest proponent of the
idea that people often help purely out of the
goodness of their hearts.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Empathy and Altruism The Pure Motive for Helping

He argues that pure altruism is most likely to
come into play when we experience empathy for the
person in need that is, we are able to
experience events and emotions the way that
person experiences them.
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Basic Motives Underlying Prosocial Behavior

• Empathy and Altruism The Pure Motive for Helping

The empathy-altruism hypothesis states that when
we feel empathy for a person, we will attempt to
help purely for altruistic reasons, that is,
regardless of what we have to gain.
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Empathy and Altruism The Pure Motive for
Helping
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Empathy and Altruism The Pure Motive for
Helping

• When did people agree to help Carol (who was in
  auto accident) w/work missed in Intro Psych? (Toi
  Batson,1982)
• High empathy Imagine how Carol felt
• Low Empathy Be objective, dont be concerned w/
  how Carol felt

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Is it altruism? Why or why not?

• exercise

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Altruistic or egoistic motives?

• It is often difficult to disentangle whether
  people are helping for altruistic or egoistic
  motives.
• If someone feels joy after helping, is that an
  egoistic motive?

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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Individual Differences The Altruistic Personality

Aspects of a persons makeup that lead the person
to help others in a wide variety of situations
defines the altruistic personality.
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Individual Differences The Altruistic Personality

Research has found that the extent to which
people are helpful in one situation is NOT highly
related to how prosocial they are in another
situation. High altruism scores not a good
predictor of helping Personality is not the only
determinant of whether people will help, at least
across many situations.
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Individual Differences The Altruistic Personality

It appears that different kinds of people are
likely to help in different types of situations.
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Gender and Helping

• Women are universally perceived as kinder, more
  soft-hearted, and more helpful.

• But over 90 of Carnegie Hero awards go to men
  (for saving, or attempting to save, the life of
  another). Why?
• --Women are more likely to help those they
  already know.
• --Men are more likely to help strangers in
  emergency situations.

From Simpson, 2004
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Gender Differences in Prosocial Behavior
Ex Men gt likely to help w/flat tire or in
dangerous situation. (short-term, strangers)
Women gt likely to help take care of a
neighbor or elderly relative. (longer-term,
close relationships)
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Gender differences in receiving help

• Are people more likely to help women or men? It
  depends.
• Male helpers are more likely to help women than
  men.
• Female helpers are equally likely to help men and
  women.
• Women not only receive more help from men, but
  they also SEEK more help.

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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior

People across cultures are more likely to help
members of their in-group, the group with which
an individual identifies as a member, than
members of the out-group, a group with which an
individual does not identity.
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Cultural Differences in Prosocial Behavior

People from collectivist cultures are more prone
to help in-group members and less likely to help
out-group members than are people from
individualist cultures.
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior

People who are in a good mood are more likely to
help.
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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior

• Good moods can increase helping for three reasons
• good moods make us interpret events in a
  sympathetic way
• helping another prolongs the good mood
• good moods increase self-attention and this in
  turn leads us to be more likely to behave
  according to our values and beliefs (and most of
  us value altruism).

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Positive Mood Feel good, do good

• When researchers have induced a good mood (e.g.,
  leaving dimes in the coin return slot of a pay
  phone, giving people cookies, etc.), they find
  that people in a good mood are more likely to
  help than those in a neutral mood.

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Personal Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Effects of Mood on Prosocial Behavior

Negative-state relief hypothesis says that people
help in order to alleviate their own sadness and
distress it exemplifies a social exchange
approach.
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Negative mood and helping

• Variety of studies show that, when people feel
  sad, they are more likely to help (e.g., donate
  money to a charity).

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Presence of Sadness

• Helping can be increased by events that trigger
  temporary sadness
• Reminiscing about unhappy experiences
• Reading depressing statements
• Failing at a task
• Witnessing harm to another

From Simpson, 2004
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AGE

• Young children are LESS likely to help when in a
  sad mood.
• They have not yet learned that helping another
  can produce good feelings.

From Simpson, 2004
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How can a sad mood and a happy mood both lead to
more helping?

• Different reasons
• Sadness Helping may improve temporary sadness.
  (But, if we blame others for our bad mood,
  sadness is not associated with more helping.)
  Complex association.
• Happiness May trigger positive thoughts about
  others. May prolong good mood. Straightforward,
  consistent association.

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Environments Rural versus Urban

People in rural areas are more helpful. This
effect holds over a wide variety of helping
situations and in many countries.
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Environments Rural versus Urban

One explanation is that people from rural
settings are brought up to be more neighborly and
more likely to trust strangers.
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Situational determinants of prosocial behavior

• Or, it might be that people living in cities are
  overwhelmed with too much stimulation if you put
  them in a calmer environment, they might be just
  as likely to help.

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Field studies conducted in 36 cities in the U.S.
• The more densely populated the area, the less
  likely people were to help.
• Location (rural or urban) more important than
  whether person grew up in small town or large
  city.

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Number of Bystanders The Bystander Effect

The bystander effect is the finding that the
greater the number of bystanders who witness an
emergency, the less likely any one of them is to
help.
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Number of Bystanders The Bystander Effect

Latané and Darley (1970) developed a decision
tree to show how people decide whether to help in
an emergency 1. Noticing an Event
Yes No 2. Interpreting the Event as an
Emergency Yes No 3. Assuming Responsibility Yes
No 4. Knowing How to Help Yes No 5. Deciding
to Implement the Help Yes No
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Stage 1 Noticing the event

• The Good Samaritan study

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Stage 1 Noticing the event

• Darley Batson, 1973 TIME PRESSURE
• IVs Hurry or No Hurry
• Topic of talk Good Samaritan parable or
  jobs for seminary students
• DV Helping a man slumped in doorway
• Results No hurry condition ____helped
• Hurry condition ___ helped
• Topic of speech was __________to helping.

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Kitty Genovese case

• Was noticing the event a problem?

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Stage 2 Interpreting the event as an emergency

• Smoke-filled room study
• video clip

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Number of Bystanders The Bystander Effect
• Pluralistic ignorance is the phenomenon whereby
  bystanders assume that nothing is wrong in an
  emergency because no one else looks concerned.
  This greatly interferes with the interpretation
  of the event as an emergency and therefore
  reduces helping.

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Kitty Genovese

• Was interpreting the event a problem in the
  Kitty Genovese case?

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Stage 3 Assuming responsibility

• Recall seizure study (earlier in the course)
• When more people were present, participants were
  less likely to help (by getting the experimenter)
  and they took longer to help (if they did help).

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• Stage 3 Assuming responsibility
• Diffusion of responsibility is the phenomenon
  whereby each bystanders sense of responsibility
  to help decreases as the number of witnesses
  increases. This results in a reduction of
  helping.

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Kitty Genovese

• Was assuming responsibility a problem?

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Stage 4 Weighing rewards and costs

• People help when the rewards outweigh the costs
• Potential rewards
• Reciprocity
• Social approval
• Self-satisfaction
• Reduced guilt and arousal
• Potential costs
• Danger/life threatening
• Financially detrimental
• Embarrassing
• Time consuming

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Stage 5 Deciding how to help

• People cannot help if they do not know how to
  help.
• Do you know CPR? The Heimlich maneuver? Your
  own blood type?
• These were not an issue in the case of Kitty
  Genovese.

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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Nature of the Relationship Communal Versus
  Exchange Relationships

Communal relationships are those in which
peoples primary concern is with the welfare of
the other, whereas exchange relationships are
governed by equity concerns.
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Situational Determinants of Prosocial Behavior

• The Nature of the Relationship Communal Versus
  Exchange Relationships

Communal/exchange distinction means that
generally we are more helpful towards friends (gt
likely to be communal) than strangers the
exception occurs when the other is beating us in
a domain that is personally important and thus
threatens our self-esteem. (Recall Tesser video)
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How Can Helping Be Increased?

• Prosocial role models
• 1--Bryan Test (1967) L.A. drivers for more
  likely to offer help to a female driver with a
  flat tire if a quarter of a mile earlier they
  had witnessed someone helping another woman
  change a tire.

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Increasing helpingProsocial models

• 2Byran Test (1967) New Jersey Xmas shoppers
  were more likely to drop money into a Salvation
  Army kettle if they had just seen someone else to
  donate.

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Increasing helpingprosocial models

• 3Rushton Campbell (1977) found British adults
  more willing to donate blood if they were
  approached after observing a confederate agree to
  donate.

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Media can encourage helping

• TV programming
• NIMH study of Mr. Rogers
• 4 wks preschool program
• Kids from less educated homes became more
  cooperative, helpful, likely to state their
  feelings during the 4 wk period than those who
  did not see the show.

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Increasing helping Disseminate research findings

• Beaman et al. (1978) Students who had heard a
  lecture on bystander intervention were more
  likely to help in a staged emergency 2 wks later.
• Heard lecture 43 helped
• Did not hear lecture 25 helped